The new Welsh Secretary is the first bearded Conservative cabinet minister for
a century. Why don't politicians and facial hair mix, asks Christopher
Howse

It is hard to know whether Stephen Crabb, the bearded new Welsh secretary, is bearing a banner for diversity and pogonotrophy. His three-year-old beardedness is borderline. It looks as though he has been holding his breath for a long time and the stubble has been forced through the follicles by pneumatic pressure.

He is the first bearded Conservative Cabinet minister since 1906, they say. Since it is not open to him to be a woman or black, a beard is the obvious semiotic vehicle to convey minority status. No Cabinet minister currently sports a flesh-tunnel earring, but beards have been going through a few brief months’ fashionability among the young, if not beards quite of Mr Crabb’s stubbly design. Yet there is still tremendous hostility to beards.

Margaret Thatcher hated the nasty, dirty things, but it’s not just a Tory prejudice. Alistair Darling, who, with his alternating white and black beard, eyebrows and hair, once resembled a liquorice allsort, had to shave before he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer under Gordon Brown. New Labour was, if anything, a cleanshaven movement. Even the Prince of Darkness (often represented with a pointed beard and curly moustache, like an Armada Spaniard) in the form of Peter Mandelson had to shave off his moustache before being elected an MP in 1992.

Never in fashion: Peter Mandelson (Photo: Ian Cook)

In his mustachioed day, upper-lip hair had transmogrified from a military badge into a gay accessory, as seen on the cowboy in Village People. The idea was to look like Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). There was no logical reason for it. There never is in fashion. It hardly mattered that moustaches were still being sported by old men of impeccable breeding, heterosexuality and military gallantry. Harold Macmillan, born 1894, was the paradigm of this older language of moustaches. But, although his grandson was to grow one, he wouldn’t have dreamt of wearing a beard.

Of course it was partly a class thing. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Rab Butler or Quintin Hogg would no more have grown beards than buttoned up the bottom button of their waistcoats or worn a soft hat before Goodwood.

This was a generation that had served in the War, mostly in the Army, which forbade beards. The Royal Navy permitted a full set, but not moustaches alone. Moustaches flourished in the RAF, and often went together with cravats in later life. Not good. Gerald Nabarro, a show-offish MP from 1950 to 1973, looked, with his handlebar moustache, as though he might have been in the RAF, though he had served in the Army. In any case he was something of a home-made gent.

The great anomaly in the disappearance of beards after the Edwardian era was the King himself, George V, who died in 1936. As the highest in the land he had nothing to fear from fashion, and 15 years of his early life had been spent in the Royal Navy. “Soon after Prince George’s 21st birthday,” wrote his biographer Kenneth Rose, “the smile disappears from his much photographed face, to be replaced by the familiar bearded stare that scarcely changed for the next half-century.”

These days, people say that what we need in the House of Commons are MPs who’ve done a proper job. I say we need MPs with proper beards. That would show they weren’t just smooth PR types. They might even have been developing interesting technology near Silicon Roundabout. When the Conservative front bench is a-rustle with the electric energy of beards, as it was in Disraeli’s administrations, the nation will prosper in unity and peace.